If you missed the Lucas Oil show at Hilltop on Friday night, your ass should be black and blue by now. There was plenty of dust at times, but the track held together pretty damn well as Matt Miller showed by flirting with the track record as the last car to qualify. The action was fast and furious all night and sometimes just plain crazy. We witnessed what might have been the dumbest move ever made by a driver on any track when Chester Elliot decided to ram the side of a parked car while a track worker was standing at the window of the parked car. The angle of attack is the only thing that saved the track worker from disaster. What the hell??!!! The racing action more than made up for that ugly incident, as the best of the best used every inch of Hilltop to put on one hell of a show. If the 3 and 4 wide action in the heats wasn't enough for you, the feature sure as hell gave you plenty more. It was hard to focus on just one battle for position as they were all through the field the entire race. Doug Drown had his hands full as he used his borrowed Malcuit ride to slice and dice through the field and put on a great show with Pearson. The battle for the lead was contested on nearly every lap between Miller, James, and Schlieper. Lapped traffic played a part at times but nothing was going to slow these guys down for long. In the final laps James was able to sneak a couple of lapped cars between himself and Miller and went on to pick up the $7000 win. A nice surprise of the evening was seeing local driver Keith Tish get a provisional to make the feature event. For a guy that has just made the move from the Pure Stocks this season, he's already shown that he's heading the right direction. What a race!

Speaking of surprises, there was a surprise visitor at Midvale Speedway on Saturday night as Ken Cunningham showed up to check things out on the "dark side". Now, don't go blaming me for screwing up the image of such a well known dirt racing photographer. It was all his idea, and he even seemed to enjoy it. Hell, he's even talking about coming back! ;-) I'm sure he got plenty of crash and burn pictures throughout the night as the action was plenty ugly once again. I was hoping he'd get to snap that feature win picture of Miller this week, but it just wasn't meant to be. After finally getting a grip on the setup last week, we now face a power problem that handicapped Mike all night. That lack of power probably saved his ass in the pursuit as he was put out early, and the next lap brought on a nasty wreck that parked the 70 car of Tedesco for the night, and probably longer. Mike would get his share of damage in the feature as he was on the outside of Willison as his engine let go, and the 18 car slid into Mike, doing some heavy damage to the left side of the car. Once again the Late Model feature looked like a demo derby and should have been ended by a time limit like all the others have been this season. For some reason they let this one continue though, and the short finishing field showed that it probably wasn't the right decision. Mike was able to pull off a 4th place finish from his 10th starting spot, and I guess you can't ask for much more on a night like this one. There will be plenty of work to be done this week getting the car put back together and finding that power problem. As any racer knows, it's that pursuit of getting everything working right at once on race night that will make ya crazy. We're close though, and it will pay off when it happens. Just wait and see. ;-)